“I had a beautiful 3 year old blue cattle cross named Charlie whom I’d rescued one night from some teenagers who were kicking him around. I packed up Charlie, some clothes and got in a car with David. It was 2002. David wanted me to move in with him but I felt raw, I was grieving and I felt like I’d been through a whole pile of judgement. I felt like I needed to stand on my own two feet, to process it all and figure out who I was now. I moved into a boarding house on Ballina Rd and my mate Paul moved up here with his girlfriend so we got a place together. They were both artists and he was a writer also. I was on fire. I was writing so much poetry and songs and making art. David and I were together. We put a band together and went through a few names till finally we were Dogsbody. We had a bit of a following and Lismore was really great then with the music scene. People paid you properly and preferred original bands to cover bands.
I wasn’t working and chose the Lismore Art Gallery for work for the dole. Bronwyn Larner was the Director and she was so beautiful to me. She got me, got my talents so she had me writing reports and programs and cataloguing the permanent collection, she let me curate exhibitions and eventually it was the 50th anniversary for the gallery so she got me to write an essay on the history of the gallery and curate the exhibition as well. There was so much history and interviews that I ended up writing a book called Ebb and Flow – A History of Lismore Regional Gallery. Bronwyn let me do workshops at the gallery and I got to put all my energy into the creative stuff I loved.
I started going to Poetry nights. We didn’t have poetry slams in Newcastle and I could win them and get 50 bucks which meant a lot since I was living on about $2 a day after expenses. I met a lot of my folks through poetry nights. David Hallett is amazing what he’s done for poets in this town with those nights. It was a real transition time for me.
Two and a half years later our drummer and bass player moved away so our band broke up. A few months after David and I broke up again which was initially mutual but afterwards I panicked. it wasn’t a clean break. There was a lot of back and forward and painfulness. I had friends here in Lismore but my real heart friends had left. I didn’t have a license, I was in another share house and I wasn’t very happy in my space. I’d had a temporary job managing staff for the show but I wasn’t finding any real work and I’d lost a baby.
I went to visit friends in the Blue Mountains and they said ‘Just come here’ so I applied for work in a Real Estate agent in Leura as a Receptionist, got it and couch surfed for a while till I got a place on my own in Katoomba with my dog. I’d never lived on my own before and it was a cute little place with apple trees which was amazing when it snowed. I was really depressed though. The break-up was really hurtful and looking back on that time I was really deeply sad. An Aboriginal elder I met while I was there told me that Katoomba wasn’t a place to stay, but a place to come for healing, so I guess I was in the right place.
I lived very quietly in Katoomba. My best friend and her family were just up the road from me and they made me part of their family. The Real Estate folded and the same day I got a job at my local corner shop. Later, I began working at an Op-Shop and ended up being one of the managers. David and I went almost a year without talking. We did at first but I wanted a chance to move on. I’d said only contact me if something happens to your grandparents or if something happens to the cat. So something happened to the cat and he contacted me. The cat survived but we started talking again and then he decided to come visit and showed up at my work with a bunch of flowers. We talked all night. I still loved him but I didn’t want to get hurt again and I wasn’t sure what to do.
I came up here for a few days and soon after I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t tell him for a long time. I wanted to make sure he really wanted to be with me and not just because of the baby. We were still talking all the time and when it was time for the first scan I felt he had to know. I couldn’t steal his right to be there for that so I told him and he came with me to the ultrasound. He wanted to be with me and I didn’t want to come back here so David said he’d move to Katoomba. We both kept working to get money together and finally after a long time we found a house. Meanwhile I was finishing my degree, so I was commuting to Newcastle all through my pregnancy. I ended up getting HD’s in everything so go pregnancy brain.
David was invited to tour with The Remains for 6 weeks. I was about 6 months along by then. I said totally go and get your rock and roll yas out. He’d lined up a job he could start in Katoomba straight after. I was packing up the house to move when I got a call from David saying ‘The tour is off, we hit a cow and I’m in Alice Springs Hospital.’ They’d hit the cow 100kms outside Tennant Creek, David was in the front passenger seat. He had broken his leg badly in four places and was about to go into surgery. I ended up doing the house move with my trouper of a Mum helping. David came off the airplane in a wheel chair off his face on pain killers. That was us then….he couldn’t walk and I was heavily pregnant. It was ridiculous. Over time friends dropped by we’d get them to move our furniture.
A couple of months later I had Romany. David had to have heaps of surgery. He went through a really rough time and he was racing Rom to see who would walk first. He beat her by two weeks. She walked at 13 months. It was a beautiful time because I had my daughter and I was so in love with her. Davey and I were both just besotted. I got another job at a 2nd hand store and we decided after 18 months that we wanted another baby. We got pregnant with Kess and we made the decision to come back here to be near Daveys’ family. We moved into his grandparents house which was now empty. It was lovely, being pregnant and living in the house where my babies’ great grandmother had been pregnant with their grandfather. I had totally loved his grandparents and it was lovely getting to carry on the family in their house.”
I hadn’t been writing much in Katoomba, the muse kind of left me but not long after I had a Kess, a really close friend died. The day that happened I needed to write and it started pouring out. I started going to poetry nights again. I met a group of really talented poet friends and it was a really dynamic scene. I was so happy because I’d found it tough going being a stay-at-home Mum of 2. We’d both started studying to be teachers but I’d been interrupted by having Kess. David was back playing gigs with the Hick-ups and I would be left home with the babies so I was frustrated at not having my old creative life.
I was writing again and I wanted to perform in the slam at the show.. The show was sponsored by Metgasco and we were deep in the fight against CSG at that point. I wanted to perform so I needed to say something how I felt about it so I felt ok about participating. I sat down and wrote ‘Mine’. That was a bit of a groundbreaking poem for me. I finished it the night before the Lismore Poetry Cup so I performed it and won which was a really big deal to me. I’d always gone in the cup when I was living in Lismore before, but thought that was for the poets that were better than me. It felt a bit like I’d arrived. A couple of days later, I won the Geraldine Bigelow prize at the show. That poem was featured in the Rock the Gate movie and was studied by high school kids. Another was accepted into an anthology that Saul Williams put together for MTV and I was invited to tour with it in the States.
Boom! I got pregnant with Oscar. I was so frustrated because it felt like the cage was descending again but as soon as I heard his heartbeat for the first time I knew how much I wanted him. The day we brought him home we all sat in the lounge room together and we knew our family was complete.
Meanwhile I was getting really interested in photography. I had always wanted to but couldn’t afford the gear. I bought a digital camera when I was pregnant with Rom and really got into it. I got a better camera and then a generous friend had given me her old dslr. People responded to my images really positively and I realised I didn’t want to be a teacher, I wanted to be a photographer. I bought my first full frame camera, I just needed a professional lens. It was $2000. The Nimbin Poetry Cup was on that weekend and I was going to watch my friend Steph compete. I had won the Lismore Cup again the year before and someone didn’t show up and Gail who organises it told me I should enter. I sat in the car and timed my possible set and it was exactly 8 minutes – the time limit.. I got through my heat, got through the semis and next thing I’d won it. The prize was $2,000 so that was my lens. It felt like the universe was saying Yes you can! So I started my business and gradually built up my gear. Lismore is so supportive and I’ve had a great trip with my photography. The photographer, Natsky, has been amazing from the word go. She said she saw herself in me and really mentored me.
David and I ended up breaking up after 8 years which was terrible. Our relationship was always tempestuous and throwing 3 kids into the mix, we didn’t get through it. All I’d ever wanted was to have a family so to lose it really knocked me for six . It was a very tough thing to get through losing something that had been so much a part of my past and all the future as well. I had to really work out what bits of me were really mine, what was left and reinvent myself. My kids saw me crying on the kitchen floor but they saw me get through it and come out of it. It’s very different being single in a small town without the buffer of a family. I said to a friend the other day i feel like I’m dancing between the sweethearts and the snake pit sometimes but it is such a great town and such a great community. I feel so lucky to have had good friends who put their arms around me through that time.
I now work at Lifeline, which I love, and run my photography business. I do some English tutoring and I’m about to start poetry mentoring as well. I moved into a lovely house a year and half ago, which felt like the kick off to a new life and David’s parents are back in town after going to Newcastle for a while so there’s family around again. I seem to be on a good trajectory where I’m getting more work and I’m growing too. I feel like I’ve taken a big leap in my photography recently and I’m trying to find time to write. All the kids are at school now, they stay at their Dad’s regularly and are happy. I lost my darling Charlie dog a few years ago but we recently adopted a rescue dog, Finnegan, who the kids utterly adore and we’re a pretty tight little unit, the 5 of us. I feel like I’ve really grown up finally. I’m excited to see what happens to us next.” The End
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